"Williamson, Jack - 01 - The Humanoids 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

The prima materia he had sought was nothing material, but only understanding. His lofty goal had been just one equation, which would be the basic statements of all reality, the final precise expression of the whole nature and relation of matter and energy, space and time, creation and decay. Knowledge, he knew, was often power, but the difficulties of his pursuit had left him little time to think of what other men might do with the potent truth he hoped to find.
Iron had failed. He tried palladium. All Starmont was merely the tool he had shaped for that vast effort. The cost had been half a lifetime spent, a fortune squandered, the wasted labor and the broken hopes of many men. The final outcome was titanic disaster, as inexplicable as any failure of those first alchemists, when their crucibles of molten lead and sulphur tantalizingly didn't turn to gold. The defeat had all but shattered him, despite the incidental knowledge he had found, and even now he couldn't understand it.
A faint clatter from the kitchen told him now that Ruth was still at home. Glad she hadn't gone to work, he looked at her dark-haired head smiling sedately from the photograph standing on his chest of drawers, the one she had given him not long before their marriage - five years ago, that must be, or nearly six.
Starmont had been new then, and his tremendous vision still unshattered. It was trouble in the computing section that first brought Ruth Cleveland to the observatory. He had secured a grant of military funds to pay for, the battery of electronic calculators and hire a staff to run them. The section was planned to do all the routine math for the research staff as well as for the military projects to be set up later, but it began with a persistent series of expensive errors.
Ruth had been the remarkably enchanting expert sent by the instrument firm to repair the machines. Briskly efficient, she tested the equipment and interviewed the staff - the chief computer and his four assistants and the graduate astronomer in charge. She even talked with Frank Ironsmith, who was not quite twenty then, only the office boy and janitor.
"The machines are perfect," she reported to Forester. "Your whole trouble has evidently been in the human equation. What you need is a mathematician. My recommendation is to transfer the rest of your staff, and put Mr. Ironsmith in charge."
"Ironsmith?" Forester remembered staring at her, his incredulous protest slowly melting into a shy approval of the fine, straight line of her nose and the clear intelligence behind her dark eyes. "That fresh kid?" he muttered weakly. "He hasn't a single degree."
"I know. He's a prospector's son, and he didn't have much schooling. But he reads, and he has a mind for math." A persuasive smile warmed her lean loveliness. "Even Einstein, the mathematician back on the mother planet who first discovered atomic energy, was once just a patent office clerk. Frank told me so today."
Forester had never suspected any unusual ability behind Ironsmith's cheerful indolence, but the unsolved problems were piling up. The math section was as essential to his purpose as the telescope itself. Reluctantly, because Ruth would admit no choice, he agreed to try Ironsmith.
And the errors somehow ceased. As casually unhurried as when his chief tool had been a broom, that slender youth never seemed too busy to drink coffee in the cafeteria and elaborate his idle paradoxes to anybody with time enough to listen, but that mountain of undone work somehow melted away. All the preliminary problems were solved. When the Crater Supernova blazed out at last, a star of incredible promise, Forester was ready.
He and Ruth were newly married, then. He grinned wearily at her picture now, thinking how shaken he had been to find unplanned passion upsetting the neat scheme of his career, almost astonished at the remembered pain of his jealousy and desire, and his sick fear that she would choose Ironsmith.
He wondered, now that he thought of it, why she hadn't. She had stayed at first just to teach Ironsmith to run the section, and the two had gone about together all that winter while the new telescope claimed his own nights. They were nearly the same age; Ironsmith was probably good enough looking and certainly sufficiently brilliant, and Forester felt sure he had loved her.
Perhaps the answer was Ironsmith's indolence, his want of push and drive. He hadn't been making enough to support her, nor had he ever even asked for a raise. She must have seen that he would never achieve anything, despite the easy glitter of his talk. Anyhow, from whatever mixture of love and respect and common prudence, she had chosen Forester, fifteen years the older and already eminent. And Ironsmith, to his relief, hadn't seemed upset about it. That was one thing he almost liked about the easygoing youth; Ironsmith never seemed to worry over anything.
Forester had forgotten the telephone, in his wistful introspections, and now the sudden burr of it startled him unpleasantly. That uneasy expectation of disaster at the project came back to shake his thin hand as he picked up the receiver.
"Chief?" The troubled voice was Armstrong's, just as he had feared. "Sorry to bother you, but something has come up that Mr. Ironsmith says you ought to know."
"Well?" He gulped uneasily. "What is it?"
"Were you expecting any message by special courier?" That competent technician seemed oddly hesitant. "From anybody named White?"
"No." He could breathe again. "Why?"
"Mr. Ironsmith just called about a child asking for you at the main gate. The guard didn't let her in, because she had no proper identification, but Mr. Ironsmith talked to her. She claimed to have a confidential message from some Mr. White."
"I don't know any Mr. White." For a moment he was merely grateful that this had been no Red Alert against space raiders from the Triplanet Powers, and then he asked, "Where's this child?"
"Nobody knows." Armstrong seemed annoyed. "That's the funny part. When the guard didn't let her in, she somehow disappeared. That's what Mr. Ironsmith says you ought to know."
"I don't see why." It hadn't been a Red Alert, and that was all that mattered. "Probably she just went somewhere else."
"Okay, Chief." Armstrong appeared relieved at his unconcern. "I didn't want to bother you about it, but Ironsmith thought you ought to know."
And they hung up.



Chapter THREE

FORESTER YAWNED and stretched, feeling better. The ringing of the telephone was certainly no proof of any psychic intuition, because it was always ringing, every time he tried to snatch any rest. An unknown child asking for him at the gate was nothing to become alarmed about, anyhow, before the occurrence or after.
He could still hear Ruth doing something in the kitchen. Baking a cake, perhaps, for she still had periodic fits of domesticity when she stayed away from the office to clean house or cook. He glanced again at the demure vivacity of her face in that old photograph, feeling a bleak regret for the emptiness of their marriage.
Nobody was to blame. Ruth had tried desperately, and he thought he had done his best. All the trouble came from that remote star in the Crater, which had already exploded, actually, long before either one of them was born. If the speed of light had been a trifle slower, it occurred to him, he might have been a doting father by now, and Ruth a contented wife and mother.
Nursing that wistful reflection, he reached absently for his slippers where Ruth had set them for him under the edge of the bed, and shuffled into the bathroom. He paused a moment before the mirror there, trying to recover some impression of himself on their wedding day. He couldn't have been quite so skinny then, or so bald, not quite such a frowning, anxious little brown-eyed gnome. Surely he had looked happier and healthier and more human then, or Ruth would have chosen Ironsmith.
That lost self of his had been a different man, he knew, still eagerly absorbed in the quest for final truth, still confident that it existed. His place was already secure in the comfortable aristocracy of science, and the ascending path of his career looked smooth ahead. He had meant to share his life fairly with Ruth, until the project claimed him.
The first cold rays of the new star, arriving two centuries old, cut short their honeymoon and changed everything. Very young and completely serious about the rites of life, for all her brisk skill with electronic calculators, Ruth had planned the trip. They were staying at the small West Coast town where she was born, and that evening they had driven out to an abandoned lighthouse and carried their picnic basket down the cliffs to a narrow scrap of beach beneath.
"That's the old Dragonrock Light." They were sprawled on their blanket in the dusk, her dark head pillowed on his shoulder, and she was happily introducing him to her fondest childhood recollections. "Grandfather used to keep it, and sometimes came down to visit-"
He saw a faint cold light on the cliffs, and turned his head and found the star. The hard violet splendor of it took his breath and brought him upright. His memory of that moment was always poignant with the cold sting and the salt taste of spray from the breakers, and the sharp smoke of damp driftwood smoldering, and Ruth's perfume - a heavy scent called Sweet Delirium. He could still see the hard blue glitter of the star's thin light, in her first tears.
Because she cried. She was no astronomer. She knew how to set up and operate an electronic integrator, but the Crater Supernova was just a point of light to her. She wanted to show Forester these places hallowed in her memories of childhood, and it hurt her that some silly star should interest him more than the depth of her young love.
"But look, darling!" Checking its position with a little pocket glass, he tried to tell her what a supernova meant. "I know that star from its position. Normally it's of the eleventh magnitude - too faint to see without a powerful telescope. Now it must be about minus nine. Twenty magnitudes of change! Which means it's a hundred million times brighter than it was a few days ago. That's a supernova - right here in our home galaxy, just two hundred light-years away! A chance like this won't come again, not in a thousand years!"
Wounded and silent, she was watching him and not the star.
"Any star, our own sun, is a great atomic engine." He tried hard to make her see. "For millions and billions of years it runs normally, changing its mass into measured energy. Sometimes, adjusting its equilibrium, one flares up with heat enough to melt its planets, and then you have an ordinary nova. But a few stars go somehow - wrong. Stability fails altogether. The star explodes into perhaps a billion times its normal brightness, releases a flood of neutrinos, and completely changes its state, shrinking to become a white dwarf. The thing is an unsolved mystery - as fundamental as the sudden failure of the binding force that lets an atom split!"
The red glow of their dying fire touched warm glints in Ruth's hair, but the thin light of the star was cold on her hurt white face, and it made hard blue diamonds of her tears.
"Please, darling!" He gestured eagerly at that stabbing violet point, and saw the sharp black shadow of his arm across her face. Its stellar magnitude, he thought, must be still increasing. "I knew that star was ripe for this," he told her breathlessly. "From its spectrum. I've been hoping this would happen in my lifetime. The computing section has finished the preliminary work, and I've special equipment ready to study it. It may tell us - everything! Please, darling-"
She yielded then, as gracefully as she could, to his more urgent passion. They left their basket and blanket forgotten on the beach, and drove hard to reach Starmont before the star had set. She went with him into the whispering gloom under the high dome, watching with an injured wonder as he toiled so frantically to set up his special spectrographs and expose his special plates while the seeing lasted.
Forester's flash of intuition, when presently it came, was as dazzling to him as the supernova's light. It illuminated the cause of that stellar engine's wreck, and revealed a new geometry of the universe, and showed him a deeper meaning even in the familiar pattern of the periodic table of the elements.
In his first hot fever of perception, he thought he had seen even more. He thought he had found his own prima materia - the ultimate understanding of the fundamental stuff of nature that science had sought since science was born. All the laws of the universe, he believed at first, could be derived from his basic equation linking the rhodomagnetic and electromagnetic fields.
Trembling with a breathless weakness, he dropped and smashed the best set of plates, the ones which most unmistakably showed the spectral displacements due to the altered rhodomagnetic field which had destroyed the internal balance of the star. He broke his pen, covering yellow pages with frantic symbols. No old alchemist, seeing some chance golden glint in his cooling crucibles, had ever been more elated.
Wistfully, now, he recalled the trembling emotion which had swept him out of the observatory, coatless and hatless in the blue chill of a windy winter dawn, to hammer and shout outside the two rooms where Ironsmith lived at the computing section - the vacated offices of the discharged staff members. That sleepy youth appeared at last, and Forester thrust the hasty calculations at him.
Drunk with his imagined triumph, Forester thought the expansions and transformations of that equation would answer every question men could ask, about the beginning and the nature and the fate of all things, about the limits of space and the mechanics of time and the meaning of life. He thought he had found the long-hidden cornerstone of all the universe.
"A rush job," he barked impatiently. "I want you to check all this work, right away - particularly this derivation for rho." Then Ironsmith's yawning astonishment made him aware of the time, and he muttered apologetically, "Sorry to wake you."